WP Smush – review
Hello friends,
In this post I will make a review of one the finest solutions for reducing the file size of all images on your WordPress website.
This solution is called WP Smush.
Why should I use such a solution?
Mainly for On-Page SEO and User Experience purposes. If all your images on your WordPress website are hosted on the same server as the site itself then each time a page is loaded they are loading as well. So let’s imagine the following situation for a moment, shall we – you have a blog post with several images, each more than 1 mb in file size. When a user opens this page all its content, including these images are being downloaded and displayed. If the user’s internet connection is poor or is lacking speed the images will either be displayed incorrectly of will be loaded extremely slowly. This might cause the user to leave the page without even reading what’s on it. Now imagine that there is something extremely valuable for all users on this page. You have just lost one potential follower and you failed to help one user.
And if the user is on a mobile internet plan, you will be wasting their own traffic. This might cause the user to pay a larger bill and never to return on your website ever again! You don’t want this, right?
Also the next reason why you want smaller images in terms of file size is because you don’t want to spend all your traffic bandwidth for nothing. The hosts are monitoring this and they are providing limited traffic for most of their hosting plans. So unless you want to spend more money on a plan that you simply do not need, just reduce the bandwidth by reducing the file size of all your content, especially the images.
And last but not least – storage space on the host. Again if you can manage to store your website on a smaller storage space, you simply do not need to spend more money for bigger one. All you have to do (once again) is to reduce the file size. Simple, right?
OK, but why WP Smush?
Because it is fast, easy and it is integrated in your WordPress website. Also this plugin works flawlessly and helps you for the reasons stated above. By using WP Smush your images will be kept at minimum file size, the loading speed will be drastically increased as will the overall performance and you will be improving the score on your On-Page SEO.
Also WP Smush is free and it is powered by the also free WPMU DEV WordPress Smush API.
How can I use it?
Install the plugin by either uploading it to WordPress or by searching for it within the “Add new” plugin installer. Then activate WP Smush and finally head to Media -> WP Smush in order to make some adjustments.
You can Auto-Smush images on their upload or Super-Smush them if you purchase WP Smush Pro (continue reading for more information about this version). You will also be able to optimize all your WordPress images by using advanced lossless compression. WP Smush works with different file formats. You can optimize without any problem: JPEG, GIF and let’s not forget about the PNG image files.
You can also manually reduce the file size for each image in the WordPress Media Library which is quite useful for older images that were uploaded before you have started using WP Smush. In case their number is great you can bulk optimize them by running WP Smush on 50 images at once. All images that are under 1 mb and smaller will be optimized by this wonderful plugin.
OK and why I might want to purchase WP Smush Pro?
Because you will increase the optimization power of the plugin and thus receive more benefits: better performance, better loading speed, even greater file size reduction and more.
WP Smush Pro is equipped with a powerful arsenal such as Super Smush which will reduce the file size of your images by applying an intelligent multi-pass lossy compression. Thus the images will be compressed twice as better than the average lossless compression and all this without any quality loss. This is achieved by improving the lossless compression itself.
Also if you have images larger than 1 mb (it sometimes happens, unfortunately) WP Smush Pro will be able to handle them without any hassle because this version of the plugin can work with file sizes up to 32 mb! And if you don’t want to wait for the processing of 50 images at a time you can do this with the professional version of WP Smush. You will bulk optimize your entire WordPress media library at once with just one click! Simple as that!
Also backup! You know that this is important, right? Well WP Smush Pro keeps a backup for each processed image in case something goes wrong or you might need the unoptimized version for some reasons. You can restore all images to their original state at any time.
And last but not least – support! You can rely on WPMU DEV at any time for any reason.
See this video for more information:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCzH7z05s5U
So would you use WP Smush, friends? And what about giving WP Smush Pro a try? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Do you know any other ways of optimizing images on WordPress? Feel free to discuss them with us as well.
See you soon, friends!
2 thoughts on “WP Smush – review”
Thank you for this review, Daniel!
However I get better results using ShortPixel plugin so far. It allows me to work with bigger images too like 10 MB/image.
Hello John! Glad that you like this review. I will have a look at the suggested plugin as well. Thank you!